The "Training Isn't Enough" Movement

Discussions around police use of force and disabled civilians usually turn quickly to training. In Chicago, for example, several high profile deaths resulted in mandatory CIT training for all Chicago officers - in policy anyway. It's not clear whether funds have been allocated and to what extent the training is ongoing, but that's another story.

But from many activists, particularly those most focused on the intersections of racism and ableism in police use of force, skepticism about training is becoming more prominent (it was always there). For example, Kerima Çevik was recently interviewed by Leroy Moore about policing and disability for Poor Magazine. It was a wide ranging interview and you should read all of it, but here's an excerpt:

Çevik: Racial profiling severely reduces the probability of police accepting my son, a Hispanic presenting male, larger than his peers, walking down the street with an unsteady gait, holding an iPad without challenging him. Which would inevitably lead to them trying to stop him, taking his iPad, and verbally demanding proof his speech device was his and their response to him not being able to respond would be to try and arrest him for stealing it. Situations like the scenario I just described, that I call ‘Mustafa’s Dilemma’ and what happened to Tario Anderson is what haunts me. That is where I am now. I am in this moment of polarization along racial lines seeking solutions to avert this and other nightmare scenarios I’ve witnessed occurring to countless disabled people, for the sake of my son and all his peers.. Training has been done. Trained officers used deadly force in encounters with clearly identified disabled teens and adults. I’ve changed my entire advocacy strategy based on this truth. The best way for a person in Mustafa’s Dilemma to remain alive and safe is to avoid any circumstance in which police engagement is necessary as much as humanly possible.

The painful lesson I’ve learned is that training initiatives fail. The fallout from the slew of deaths that spurred the Black Lives Matter movement is that the majority of those lives lost were disabled Black lives. I learned the police officers that shot both Paul Childs III and Stephon Watts were thoroughly trained and also knew the victims prior to the fatal encounters. This knowledge changed the focus of both my parenting and advocacy.

Later, Moore asks:

Leroy Moore: If it’s not police training then what are your suggestions and it can be for our community (For me I think we only focus on what police need and not what the community need)?

Kerima Çevik: Leroy I agree that we are focusing on what we think police need when we need to reduce police engagement and increase community supports that limit the need for police contact as much as possible. I won’t advise the community but I can tell you what I personally would like to see happen.

I’d like to see efforts made to establish a 911-type number for mental health emergencies/psychiatric disability related crises and more community crisis response teams to answer them. There is a myth that policy makers are exploiting based on a moment in history. This myth that after the Willow brook scandal, we just opened the doors of mental institutions and threw the patients out to wander the streets, and that to this day those same individuals are out there being a danger to themselves and others. The new fear factor story being added to that is we really need to bring back mental institutions. Victim blaming every deceased victim of a catastrophic police encounter with a person with psychiatric disability and sprinkling that disgrace with a healthy dose of posthumously declaring every white male mass shooter as a mental health patient achieves this fear driven train wreck. Uh nope! I think that funding being demanded for the return of the infamous mental institution model of mental health treatment, research, and ‘residential care’ should be given to desegregated, community supported mental health solutions that work in accord with the Olmstead Decision. I think we need to build on peer mentoring and peer respite centers, an idea that has already been proven successful in other parts of the country. I think we need to be seeking preventative solutions that solve the main series of events that ends in catastrophe for so many disabled victims, and that is the present situation where a mental health call is lumped in with a 911 call and therefore has police responding where they shouldn’t be. I think we should be increasing healthy inclusive school environments for neurodivergent students at school by paying school support staff wages that retain them and training them, not calling SROs to handcuff autistic children to squad cars.

Çevik and Moore are essential voices pushing for structural change, rather than simply trying to make the police less likely to misuse force against a disabled victim.

Disability and Policing: Equip for Equality

I spent the morning at Equip for Equality in Downtown Chicago, learning from attorney Amanda Antholt as she discussed policing and disability.

"Where we see police misconduct, it’s the same sort of set of events. Gave an order, you didn’t comply, so I’m escalating." @equip4equality

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 30, 2016

Antholt has a long history as a police misconduct lawyer, so I was especially pleased to hear her say the above. We agree that there are many specific issues about specific disabilities that matters, but that the bigger picture is this basic pattern of how police are trained to seize control.

See more tweets in my feed on the event. Feel free to storify if that's useful to you. I'm writing Chapter 7.

TASERs are Not Mental Health Care. Disability is Not a Crime.

In response to the recent shooting of Quintonio Legrier and Bettie Jones, embattled mayor Rahm Emanuel has made a decision - give all cops Tasers.

Chicago's mayor and police superintendent will announce Wednesday afternoon that every police officer who responds to service calls will be equipped with a Taser and properly trained to use it by June 1, the mayor's deputy director of communications said. The announcement, to be made at 2 p.m. CT, will be part of a major overhaul in Chicago Police Department policy on how officers respond to incidents and the use of physical and lethal force, mayor's spokesman Adam Collins said.

Tasers are a fine tool for policing, when used correctly. Too often, they reinforce the cult of compliance, giving police an easy (and approved) way to inflict pain on non-compliant, but non-threatening, individuals. Overall, though, I have been convinced that law enforcement officers (LEOs) should be provided with Tasers in most contexts, so long as abusers are held accountable.

What we're seeing, though, with Emanuel's response to Legrier/Jones and Philip Coleman is a continued focus on teaching police to manage crisis better. Such training and tools may be required, but the real solutions require focusing before the crisis and investing in public health, pushing back against stigma, funding community mental care teams, and more.

Instead, we're giving cops TASERs and closing community mental health care facilities.

Placard for Deaf Drivers Reveals Problems with Policing

Cincinnati has a new red and white placard that deaf and hard-of-hearing drivers can place in their car to inform police officers of their disability. Here's an image from a local news tweet.

.@CincinnatiPD & students at @uofcincy help design traffic stop safety placards for the deaf & hard of hearing. pic.twitter.com/M6C6fOcGvn

— Angela Ingram (@Newslaw1) November 26, 2015

The placard says, in part:

I am a Deaf/HH Driver

Failure to cooperate with your verbal commands

means I AM NOT hearing you

I do not read lips

Using a flashlight at night will prevent me from

seeing any gestures

Qualified interpreters must be provided ...

From the article:

Officer Richard Longworth is with Cincinnati Police Department's Community Relations Unit and helped design the placards.

"It's bright red. It's split between red and white. We wanted highly contrasting colors that the officer would be able to notice if he shined his light up on to a car," said Officer Longworth.

Drivers display the placard where the officer can easily see it. It explains that the driver has special needs and it also has tips for the driver on how to handle the traffic stop. The placards are necessary because police need to know why a person is not responding to verbal commands.

Longworth explained, "It's going to be seen as some form of passive resistance." "He's going to be giving verbal commands and if they're not responsive to those commands, it's going to raise his stress level even higher."

All of this is true. Too many police take non-compliance on its own, absent other indicators of danger, as a threat requiring escalation. Deaf individuals are at risk.

No one, though, should be required to wear a special badge, piece of clothing, or put up a sign in order to be guaranteed their basic rights. I am concerned that such placards teach police to look for the placard and, if visible, give people their rights. If not visible, well, then it's back to violence as a reward for non-compliance.

We've seen this before. In the wake of the Ethan Saylor killing, some people proposed teaching our kids hand signals, indicating - I am disabled! In Colorado, autism advocates proposed a yellow shirt saying, "I have autism. If I am alone please call 911."

This shirt, like the placard, like the hand signal, all convey the same message to police: Don't treat me as badly as you normally treat other non-threatening but non-compliant individuals. 

This is the medical model, in which we attack inequalities diagnosis by diagnosis, rather than working on the underlying problem.

As regular readers know, I call the underlying problem the cult of compliance. You can follow the tag below to see other examples.

Cult of Compliance - Police Officer Grabs Teen Boy By the Throat

This is a video of a school cop grabbing an African-American teenager by the throat for, it appears, trying to walk away. There had been a fight, the officer was telling him something, and the boy was trying to leave.

Unless the boy was making some kind of threat, which no one has claimed he has, there's no justification other than raw assertion of power for this action.

The police officer needs to be disciplined. But won't be. He'll use lack of compliance as a justification for whatever action followed.

Disability and Policing - My Front Porch

The front screen door opened and then closed. I thought it was a package. But then I heard male voices on my porch. Was the delivery man saying hi to a neighbor? After a few minutes, when they continued, I opened the door to find a police officer on my porch, another on the sidewalk in front of the house, and my neighbor - a man maybe in his late 50s or early 60s (he's a Vietnam war vet) next to him.

In the rocking chair, just to the left of the door, sat my neighbor's mother, G. She said, sweetly, "I just came up to your porch to sit." Then she told me that these men wanted to take her away, that they were stupids. The police officer, very calmly, replied directly to her that he was there to help, that she had been wandering, but that because she said she was going to throw herself in front of a car, he had to take that seriously.

G asked me if she could come inside, but I demurred, offering instead to help walk her to where she needed to go. She asked me to walk her back to her house, and I carefully helped her down the stairs. As we got down the block a bit, an ambulance pulled up, and without real complaint (but much insulting commentary directed at the police), we walked towards the curb as the paramedics got out. Once she was well in their hands, she more or less dismissed me, and 10-15 more minutes elapsed as step-by-step they got her to the back of the ambulance, onto the gurney, and into the vehicle.

I chatted with the second officer about the unexpected arrival of my subject field - police interactions with people with disabilities - on my front porch. And I complimented their patience and thoughtfulness in handling it.

It's going to be a rough period for G and her son, but I'm pleased to see the police are ready to both take threats of self-harm seriously and to respond so patiently and calmly. Both G and the officers are welcome on my porch any time.

No Consensus on Mental Health and Policing

Yesterday, I wrote about the death of Anthony Hill, a man with bipolar disorder, who, while naked and unarmed, was killed by police in the Atlanta area. Here are three stories on how police should respond to these sorts of situations (I'm guessing there are 500+ related deaths a year nationally, but numbers are hard to locate).

New Jersey - Crisis Intervention Training Pays Off.

Police officers in 11 New Jersey counties have received crisis-intervention training to interact more effectively with people who have mental illnesses, and research shows that the program is changing cops' attitudes.
During the weeklong, 40-hour training, officers learn about symptoms, meet with people who have a mental illness, and study techniques to de-escalate difficult situations.
"Trainers educate the officer that a person's behavior is often out of their control," explained Mary Lynne Reynolds, executive director of the Mental Health Association in Southwestern New Jersey. "For example, if someone is in a state of mania, they cannot stand still. So if a police officer says, 'stand still,' the individual can't do that."

I like that last line a lot, as it directly works against the cult of compliance. But there are other models, instead of training each officer to handle these situations. In Baltimore, the idea is to create special mental health cops.

State Sen. Shirley Nathan-Pulliam (District 44) and Del. Charles Sydnor (District 44B) have sponsored legislation that would create separate mental health units for the Baltimore City police department and establish an evaluation system for the unit that already exists in Baltimore County.
The legislation would establish a pilot program requiring both police departments to have units made up of officers trained to understand the needs of those with mental illness.

Meanwhile, in Montreal - training seems of limited use.

Paulin Bureau, director of training at École nationale de police du Québec, detailed how many hours of training are dedicated to dealing with people who suffer from mental health issues and with the homeless.
He said the college offers continuing training to police forces across the province.
But Bureau stressed training isn't an easy fix for police dealing with people who have mental health issues.
Bureau told the inquest cadets might not have to put that training into use in the field for a few years, and by then it would be difficult to recall what they had learned about dealing with someone in crisis.

After 15 weeks of training at the provincial police college, officers don't come out as mental health specialists with the ability to diagnose someone in a short time period, Bureau said.
He said a police officer could get additional training for dealing with mental health issues one year and might not have to use that training for months or even years.

I'm more a fan of the Baltimore model (which is itself the San Antonio model), but even that I think has limited impact. There are medical issues related to mental health and cops need to know them and/or have instant and reliable access to experts. But that's secondary to changing attitudes and approaches to potentially violent encounters.

For me, I've been persuaded that the focus should be on strategic thinking generally, not mental-health specific training. Much more on this to come over the months ahead.

Justified? - One death in which officers try to do everything right.

This appears to be Grade-A policing...restraint/stabilization until action/force is unavoidable. http://t.co/DxlzDLo1bw @Lollardfish ^lh
— The Virtus Group (@TheVirtusGroup) February 7, 2015

I write a lot about bad killings and ugly use-of-force incidents. I then get asked, "well what should the cops have done?" which is a fair question. One of the people I rely on is CIT and SWAT trained officer Louis Hayes, a member of the Virtus Group, a use-of-force trainer and one of the founders of the Illinois model. You can see his tweet above.

Here's a video of a police shooting, linked not embedded, in which police do initially show tactical restraint and back up out a house in which an encounter is deteriorating.

What's impressive about his is how hard the officers work to not shoot a drunk, armed (he picks up knives at various points during the video), mentally unstable (thanks to THC, alcohol, and perhaps other factors) individual. Like Hayes, I try to avoid rendering absolute judgment. Notice his "appears" in the tweet. But many other incidents I've watched would have ended with gunfire right away.

Instead, the officer keep backing up, backing up, calling for support, backing up, and trying to stabilize. It may be that at the end the officer makes a mistake by going back close to the house and allowing the suspect to re-engage (breaking a window, glass in the officer's face) and thus drawing fire, but if so it was within a context of trying to stabilize overall.

This time, the officers still shot and killed the individual. But if this is the standard for police conduct in dangerous situations, a lot of lives will be saved - including law enforcement lives.

#JusticeForEthan and the Election of a Sheriff

I started writing about police violence and disability because of the death of Ethan Saylor. I had read stories like this for years, but when Ethan died, unlike during previous tragedies, I had a few links to media.

I first wrote this piece for The Nation.
I then wrote this widely-read piece for CNN and did a lot of radio after.

I began to study police training in earnest, first wrote the words "cult of compliance," and have now published repeatedly on this subject. It's always in Ethan's memory.

Right now, in Frederick MD, there's a sheriff's election about to take place. The men who killed Ethan were deputies. In the wake of his death, the right-wing tea-partier anti-immigrant pro-income-inequality Sheriff Jenkins made it clear that his boys did nothing wrong in his eyes. He got support from the local government, too (this is my piece on the villains of the story).

He's up for re-election. Karl Bickel is running against him with the full support of the Saylor family and the disability community. Follow this link for a Saylor-family online fundraiser for Bickel.

That's not actually why I'm writing this blog. I'm writing because Sheriff Jenkins' brother, Gary Jenkins, put a letter about Ethan Saylor in the local paper, which I will quote in full.

It is unfortunate that Ethan Saylor lost his life in a preventable situation. With that said, I for one am tired of hearing all the theories of who is to blame, especially the security officers (who happened to be off-duty deputies). According to The Frederick News-Post, all witnesses conveyed that security did not act inappropriately or mistreat him in any way.

Some people tried to blame the movie theatre staff, saying they could have let him stay for free. These are mostly young adults doing what they are told and afraid to lose their jobs. Patti Saylor blames Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, again misplaced.

I would suggest Patti go to the bathroom, look in the mirror and face the blame. What was she doing that night so important she could not accompany Ethan to the movie? I know we all need time alone, however, she should have known better to send him out in public with someone ill-equipped to handle him. If she couldn’t go, keep him home in his comfort zone or send him with someone properly trained. According to The News-Post, she directed his care provider to leave him alone in the theater, another mistake for which she is to blame. Her poor choices are to blame and she should accept responsibility.

Then we have Karl Bickel show up with a political agenda and criticize our sheriff over the incident, while he has no clue what happened as he did not bother to read the report, according to an article in the Aug. 28 News-Post (“Saylor endorses Bickel”). Here again, he is trying to capitalize on the death of a young man. Disgusting and shameful behavior; certainly not what I would expect from a candidate for sheriff.

I want to focus on that this paragraph, the one that blames Patti Saylor for her son's death. To Jenkins, society cannot adapt to people with disabilities; rather, people with disabilities must be kept contained at all times or their parents are to blame for what happens. Patti and her aide made reasonable decisions.

The only people who made unconscionable decisions were the deputies who decided that Ethan's non-compliance justified throwing him to the ground and handcuffing him, a process during which he asphyxiated. They have never been held accountable for their actions.

These are the stakes in the battle for inclusion. These are the stakes in the battle to support the ADA and its continued implementation. The stakes are high.

Good luck to Karl Bickel.

#CultofCompliance - Living while Black

Here are four stories literally just from last night (they happened at different times, but made news yesterday). They illustrate the way racism enables and is enabled by the cult of compliance. The cult provides an intersectional lens in which race and class dominate the middle, with disability not far behind. When these categories overlap in a single individual, trouble beckons.

Incident 1: Sitting while black in a public space. 

The African-American man was sitting outside a store, waiting for his kids to get out of school. The store clerk got nervous - a black man sitting! For ten minutes! - so he called the police. When the police arrived, they demanded his ID. He didn't comply:

The man in the video tells the officer he was sitting in front of the store for 10 minutes as he waited for his kids to get out of school, and that the area is public and he had a right to sit there.
“The problem was —” the female officer begins.
“The problem is I’m black,” the man fires back. “It really is, because I’m not sitting there with a group of people. I’m sitting there by myself. By myself, not causing a problem.”
Eventually a second male officer approaches the man in the video and attempts to restrain him.
“I’ve got to go get my kids,” the man tells the second officer, pulling his arm away. “Please don’t touch me.”
“You’re going to go to jail then,” the second officer says.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” the man replies.
At this point, both officers grab the man.
“Come on brother,” the man says, “This is assault.”
“I’m not your brother,” the second officer replies. “Put your hands behind your back otherwise it’s going to get ugly.”
Eventually the officers start to cuff the man and he drops his cellphone and the video goes black.
“I haven’t done anything wrong!” we hear the man yell. “Can somebody help me? That’s my kids, right there! My kids are right there!”
“Put your hands behind your back!” the male officer screams.

Then they tased him.

UPDATES (8/29/14) - More on the Chris Lollie story from the City Pages in the Twin Cities. Charges has been dropped. Police defended their actions. Lollie is filing a complaint and considering a lawsuit. Lawyers weigh in. MY QUESTION - Who called it in at the bank. Do you use that bank? Can you talk to the manager?

Incident 2: Hands in pockets while black and autistic

This was from three years ago, but I just heard about the story yesterday when the judge dismissed the lawsuit. A boy was in his yard when the cops pulled up.

According to Yearby, her son was standing in front of their apartment on Southampton Road minding his own business when two officers on patrol approached him and questioned him. The officers later said they thought he looked suspicious.
"I ran outside and the police pushed me back and I asked him, 'what was going on?' and [the officer] was like 'I asked your son to take his hands out of his pockets,'" recalled Vicky Yearby.
Yearby said she and a neighbor told the officers her son was mentally disabled but they ignored them and continued to yell at Isaac Yearby and frighten him.
Video captured from the Taser camera shows Yearby removed his hands from his pockets then flailed his arms. Seconds later the Taser fired and he fell to the ground. The lawsuit claimed the fall caused Isaac Yearby to suffer seizures which continued periodically.

And of course, there's no accountability.

College Park Police Chief Ron Fears declined an interview but city spokesman Gerald Walker issued a statement which reads, "The City of College Park's Police Department respects the rights of all citizens and visitors, and pledges to maintain a safe community."
It goes on, "[t]he situation in 2011 with Mr. Yearby was unfortunate; however, Judge Marvin Shoob's summary exonerated our officers and their actions. The College Park Police Department continues to protect and serve, and hopes for the best for everyone involved in this case."

This is not what protecting and serving looks like.

Incident 3 (from Digby and Rawstory): Not Walking While Black 

There was a foot chase and the man, an African American named Gregory Towns, was exhausted, but caught. He wouldn't walk, so they started tasing him, driving him with electric shocks as if he were an animal. He died.

But Police Benevolent Association lawyers representing Weems continued to insist that the officer’s actions did not cause Towns to die.
Attorney Dale Preiser issued a statement saying that the “use of drive stun to gain compliance is permitted under federal and Georgia law

Read that again. Under federal and Georgia law, it's fine to use a taser to "gain compliance."

Incident 4 - Not Resisting While Black

Stop Trying to Take My Gun!" The cop shouted this as he was attacking a black man with his hands up.

Cameras have lately been touted as a major solution to police brutality. And they are definitely a HUGE help. What's interesting to me, and upsetting, is the way that police are beginning to game their speech so that they'll have an excuse for the camera.

As we've seen in the Michael Brown case, "he was reaching for my gun" is the excuse that police use when they shoot someone unarmed. Here's a case where the video catches the whole thing.

All the criminal charges against Marcus Jeter have been dismissed, and two Bloomfield police officers have been indicted for falsifying reports, and one of them, for assault.
A third pleaded guilty early on to tampering. It's all thanks to those dashcam tapes. It's the video that prosecutors say they never saw when the pursued criminal charges against 30 year-old Marcus Jeter . In the video, his hands were in the air. He was charged with eluding police, resisting arrest and assault. One officer in the video can be seen throwing repeated punches.

His hands are in the air, because he's a black man, and he knows that if he looks  threatening, he can be shot with impunity.

The video, starting around 2:30, is terrible. Listen to the cop screaming, "Stop Resisting! Stop Resisting! Why are you trying to touch my fucking gun! Get off my gun!"

They are faking resistance for the camera.

Good news: The cops have been charged. There may be justice in this case.
Bad news: How many other people have gone to jail while the cops screamed, "Stop resisting!" to an unarmed man with his hands up. They are learning to play for their cameras. 

Here's one final link. This is a white man in Florida. His son, who is autistic, was pulled over and the father drove to help, but the cops didn't want his help. This is their command training - a civilian interfering is a threat to their command presence, so they don't allow it. The man calmly asserts his rights, he tells the officers that the boy is autistic. If you watch the video, you can see them look at the camera being held by the son, move to block a little. They grab him, throw him to the ground, tase him, and shout, "GET ON THE GROUND! STOP RESISTING." That, they hope, will provide them with the excuse they need.

Of course they charged him with resisting arrest.

The Cult of Compliance provides our intersectional lens. We know these cases are wrong. We know about them because of video, because of disability, because of luck. Most of the victims are people of color. Most of the victims never get any publicity.

Here's one vital lesson for white folks like me. When Michael Brown was killed, a lot of white people, mostly but not exclusively conservatives, said, "He should have just complied when the police told him to get out of the road." Maybe. Maybe it would have saved him. But as we can see here, there is no correct behavior that will protect a black man from police brutality. All behaviors - standing, sitting, walking, not walking, showing your hands, hands in your pockets - are suspect.

The Stakes: Parents need Police

At about 9:30 AM yesterday I got a series of texts from my babysitter. She had been tidying toys with my daughter in one of the rooms, and suddenly Nico, my son, was gone. She and Ellie searched the house, looked outside, and gradually panicked. They called the cops. They ran around. They shouted. They found Nico sitting inside the back door with dirty feet. The police showed up and everything was fine.

I did three things. I reassured my babysitter that it was ok, that it had happened to me, and that I would take steps. I called a handyman to install door chains so we can better secure our home .

Later, I called the police to talk about registering my son with them. I need to send them a picture, some ideas about where he might go if he were lost, ways of interacting with him, and so forth. I felt re-assured.

There's some irony here. I've been writing for a year about police violence and disability, usually in tones highly critical of police actions. In the meantime, I'm relying on the police to help take care of my son in case he wanders.

And that's the point. I write about police violence and disability BECAUSE my son is vulnerable to all kinds of dangers, and I need them to be there for him. 

Those are the stakes.

Cult of Compliance - St. Louis Police Shoot and Kill Black Man With Mental Disability

Today St. Louis police shot a man with a knife. He had been acting erratically, police showed up, he raised the knife and said shoot me now, so they did. Read more about it here.

The officers ordered the man to get down, according to Dotson. The man, 23, became more agitated and walked toward them, reaching for his waistband. Witnesses told police the man was yelling "Shoot me, kill me now," during the encounter.

The officers drew their weapons and ordered the man to stop. He did stop, but then pulled out a knife and came at the officers with it held up high, Dotson said. They ordered him to stop and drop the knife. When he got within two or three feet of the officers, they fired, killing the man.
“This is a lethal range for a knife,” Dotson said.
...
Several in the crowd asked why police did not use tasers to bring down the subject. Dotson said police officers have the right to defend themselves when an agitated man is coming at them with a knife. Said the chief, “Officers have a reasonable expectation to go home at the end of their shift.”

Here are some early thoughts. This is another case of police shooting a black man in St. Louis. The intersection with disability, though, is where I want to focus now.

Could a real journalist on the ground ask Dotson about Crisis Intervention Team training (CIT) in St. Louis. Did these officers have it? Do any officers in the area have it. Do the officers understand that there are techniques for addressing mental illness-related situations that do not involve shooting. I wrote about some of them with Lawrence Carter-Long here.

A man at close range with a knife justifies the use of lethal force. These officers will quickly get off paid leave and go back to work. But note the situation. The officers say, "Stop." Man with psychatric disability hoping to get killed by police does not stop. So the officers say, "Stop." The only way out is death. The only path to life is not to draw your weapons and advance.

I don't know all the details, yet, but I'd very much like to know about the disability aspects here. Because here's a tweet from a USAToday journalist:

Eyewitness says people on the street were screaming to police officers that the man killed had mental health problems.
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) August 19, 2014

The officers have the right not to be stabbed and to use lethal force. What they also have the right to do, if no one else was in jeopardy, is to take a different approach to a known mental health situation.

Cult of Compliance - Man shoots panhandler as he runs away

From Digby, we have another example of what I call the cult of compliance.

In Springfield, MO, a panhandler in a Walmart parking lot, Eric David Butts, was confronted by a police officer, Jason Schuck. Butts turned to run away and Schuck drew his weapon and shot him in the back. Later, he claimed that he was reaching for his taser, which may in fact be true. In America, it's normal to send tens of thousands of volts through a non-violent man running away from confrontation.

Here's what Digby says:

Honestly, the shooting in the back is a terrible thing. But from the sound of it it actually was an accident --- the cop was negligent, but it doesn't appear he meant to shoot him. But the fact that nobody questions the officer's decision to taser a mentally ill panhandler who was leaving the scene is even worse. Yes, he had failed to appear in court and had a warrant. So what? He's schizophrenic, known to the cop, and pumping him full of electricity for failing to comply in a situation like this is as cruel as beating him with a nightstick. Unless someone's life is at stake, there's just no excuse for it.

This is the right interpretation of the event. Non-compliance is a justification for violence, whether taser, nightstick, pepper-spray, boot, or gun.

The man had mental illness, and yes, he may have been involved in various kinds of petty non-violent crime, and he was running away. It reminds me of the death of Israel Hernandez, a wonderful artist whose medium, graffiti, did indeed mean he was breaking the law. The police caught him, he ran, they tasered, he died. The local police chief said, "The officers were forced to use the Taser to avoid a physical incident."

Let's be clear. A non-violent suspect of non-violent crimes who is running away is not a threat. The officers are not forced to tase them, but choose to, perhaps even are trained to do so.

We, as a society, have to choose what we value.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/07/3548779/graffiti-artist-dies-after-tasering.html#storylink=cpy

Cult of Compliance - Arizona State Cops vs Ersula Ore

At the end of May, a black female professor named Ersula Ore at Arizona State University was walking across the street when she was arrested for jaywalking. By report, people cross at that site regularly to avoid construction and it is reasonably suspicious that a black woman was the person singled out by police.

She has been charged with a felony for kicking at him after she was flung to the ground. Police reviewed the file and said they did nothing wrong. There is a move-on petition (I have signed it). Here's a local article on the story as the case is being re-reviewed in the wake of viral social media response. Then Huffington Post and CNN. There's lots more.

I argue that along with race, which is central to the case I believe, we've got an example of the cult of compliance. We have made it possible to criminalize non-compliance. If you don't obey police, they can physically hurt you, and if you defend yourself, you get charged with attacking the police. This happens all the time across America, especially to non-white people, but we rarely hear about it. The stories that make the news often involve disability, as the disability functions to absolve the victim of police violence, or at least complicate the narrative. In this case, we hear about the story because it involves a professor the means to leverage social media outrage, to speak for herself, and because professor does still command some respect in American discourse. An average black woman harassed by police is not news, and the new would not cover it.

We also only hear about it because someone called 911 on the COP who was being too aggressive. I'm grateful to that person.

Here's the video. There's also dash-cam video now if you follow that link.

This is the cult of compliance. If she just complies, gives her ID, is nicely respectful, she probably just gets a citation. Stand up for your rights, even as a professor on your own campus, and this is what happens.

As always, we can do better.

Police Brutality, Warrior Cops and Disability - Why is this happening and what do we do?

Yesterday's piece in The Atlantic has a quite excellent comment section (in general, Atlantic readers' comments are polite and smart, if still sometimes easily led to the hostility that happens online everywhere).

Here are three followup points (I know this is long, but bear with me).

1. Why/how are these incidents happening now?

2. How much risk do we, as a society, ask our police to take on? What are the trade-offs? (h/t Schneier)

3. What about accountability and lawsuits?

1. One early comment linked the problem that Lawrence and I wrote about to the "rise of the warrior cop," a phrase coined by Radley Balko in a must-read book. His figures and basic argument is unimpeachable: The rise is happening, it's dangerous, SWAT is wildly overused (both links to Balko), and it's a societal problem.

I'm not sure, though, that it's specifically the problem leading to the violence against people with disabilities. I responded to the comment:

I think about this all the time. Are these trends part of the post-9/11 change that Balko so ably documents, or do we just have better technology for locating, recording, and nationalizing these incidents? I genuinely do not know the answer.

From another reader, I received this very smart response:

Were I interested in crafting a thesis on a broader issue perhaps driving that change, I might focus on how violence is folded into a community. Certainly in this country we have a history of violence in the name of preserving community, the KKK being a quite visible example. Now we've arrived at a place where government functions have been formally decontextualized from the historically standard "community," and law enforcement along with them. LEOs therefore no longer act so much as members of the community as neutral agents representing the monolith of the law - but they're only people, and furthermore they're people who have to navigate communities in the midst of a century (so far) of contentious social navigation, as our entire society translates from one of assimilation to one possessing a much more complex matrix of identity. Add to that cocktail ubiquitous camera ownership, and it's easy to contrast what we believe police should be with what they're used to doing.

Read that again. I don't know that I agree totally, but read it again as it's complex and interesting.

I've been arguing about "the what" - the cult of compliance - as a way to coordinate diverse acts of compliance-veneration across the country and beyond the arena of law enforcement.

This comment offers a thought on "the how" - why is this happening and why is this happening more now.

This is why I engage in my comments, to get smarter. To learn to see things new way.

2. Another set of comments both on the article and elsewhere focus on the police and the hazardous nature of their job. They have the right to demand respect, they have the obligation to treat every contact as a potential maniac (note the disability word there) about to go crazy (again) and attack them, and we have the obligation to obey.

It's true that we ask police to do a very difficult job and we need to afford them considerable latitude in how they do it. And we do - they have all kinds of powers that most of us don't have, including laws that make it illegal to "resist or obstruct" them. In exchange for these powers, we have to ask them to accept risk. Bruce Schneier wrote about this last year.

We're afraid of risk. It's a normal part of life, but we're increasingly unwilling to accept it at any level. So we turn to technology to protect us. The problem is that technological security measures aren't free. They cost money, of course, but they cost other things as well. They often don't provide the security they advertise, and -- paradoxically -- they often increase risk somewhere else. This problem is particularly stark when the risk involves another person: crime, terrorism, and so on. While technology has made us much safer against natural risks like accidents and disease, it works less well against man-made risks.

Three examples:

We have allowed the police to turn themselves into a paramilitary organization. They deploy SWAT teams multiple times a day, almost always in nondangerous situations. They tase people at minimal provocation, often when it's not warranted. Unprovoked shootings are on the rise. One result of these measures is that honest mistakes -- a wrong address on a warrant, a misunderstanding -- result in the terrorizing of innocent people, and more death in what were once nonviolent confrontations with police.

He goes on to talk about zero-tolerance in schools, the money fighting terrorism, and so forth. Read the essay.

The question we have to weigh is how much risk should police take on versus how many innocent but potentially non-compliant people getting hurt or even killed? More risk and more patience in dealing with complex scenarios saves civilian lives. Less risk and the tase-first attitude kills more suspects, some of whom will be innocent, others of whom will be guilty only of minor infractions that do not justify the application of force. Schneier finishes:

We need to relearn how to recognize the trade-offs that come from risk management, especially risk from our fellow human beings. We need to relearn how to accept risk, and even embrace it, as essential to human progress and our free society. The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.

3. Then there are just bad cops.

There are abusers in the police, some intentionally, some reflexively. All organizations have bad people; bad people in the police carry firearms and have widespread protections against accountability. Civil lawsuits have to be a part of the remedy, as they allow for discovery, which can untangle the obfuscatory nature of departmental CYA policies. But really, departments and their supervising bodies need to hold their own accountable in ALL CASES.

Disability gives us a wedge here. I wrote about Antonio Martinez, the Latino man with Down syndrome who was attacked by police who mistook him for a different (and foot taller) Latino man. I have always read this as a case of racial profiling gone wrong, but only thanks to Martinez' disability did it make news. I can't prove this, of course.

I wrote about accountability here, in the wake of the Ethan Saylor discussion last fall. On Martinez:

Strip away the explanation of disability and reconsider each incident. After the Martinez beating, the San Diego Sheriff’s department admitted their mistake. Spokesperson Jan Caldwell said, “It was a dark night. There was a non-compliant person that was hiding his face and hiding his hands. It’s clear in the light of day that this man had a disability, but the deputy at the time didn’t know that.” Blaine Young, the president of the board of commissioners in Frederick County, Maryland, similarly blames non-compliance for Saylor’s death. Young said, “If people get in trouble and would just do what the officers say, we wouldn’t have any incidents.”

According to Caldwell, if you don’t have a disability, but are walking down the street on a chilly night, wearing a hoodie and hiding your hands, any amount of non-compliance merits a truncheon to the head and pepper spray in the eyes. According to Young, it is Saylor’s fault for not listening that led to his death over the price of a movie ticket. 

A man without Down syndrome who died in custody for not having a movie ticket doesn't generate national news. A Latino beaten by police in San Diego doesn't generate national news.  It's reading these explanations by Caldwell and Young, along with so many others, that pushed me to talk about the cult of compliance as a generalized societal problem. The cases involve disability deserve attention for their own merits, but let them also serve as a canary in the coal mine. Our civil liberties really are under attack.

There are remedies:

We can start pushing the pendulum back toward a more free society. We can balance our safety and our civil liberties against the safety of our first responders.

First, police must stop thinking of their tasers, pepper spray, and truncheons as a first-resort solution. Deploying a weapon, any weapon, must require a potentially dangerous situation.

Second, we must push for increased emphasis on non-violent training programs for those who are sworn to protect and serve. Police need more training in defusing situations by communicating and by staying calm, not by shooting 40,000 volts through the body or launching pepper spray into the eyes.

Finally, accountability must be part of equation. This is not just an abstract problem. Robert Ethan Saylor is dead. The men who killed him went back to work after their boss said they did nothing wrong. There must be consequences for people who choose force instead of patience.

There really must be consequences for people who choose force instead of patience.  

Police Violence and Disability

I co-write a new piece just published by The Atlantic on police violence and disability. My co-author is Lawrence Carter-Long, communications director for the National Council on Disability. I'm really honored to have worked with him and hope that more collaborations with the NCD follow.

There's nothing surprising in this piece for readers of this blog, but for new people, I've been writing about Ethan Saylor for well over a year now, on the blog, in The Nation, for CNN, and beyond. My points are always these:

1) What happened to Ethan was wrong and was correctable with better training or, frankly, just a little common sense and patience.
2) Due to the nature of disability, it could happen to you or your loved ones too, even if you are not presently disabled.
3) Such incidents reflect a much bigger cultural problem - a focus on compliance over all other principles, including civil liberties. I call it the "Cult of Compliance." This link is to one definition page but if you search the tag compliance, you'll see lots more.

Please read the piece. Comment there or here (here if you want me to see it). I'm thrilled there was a Senate hearing, but we need to do much more.

Cult of Compliance: Occupy NYC and the Trials

Cecily goes to prison bc you're supposed to let cops do whatever they want to your body. Frisking, groping, doesn't matter. #Justice4Cecily
— Sarah Leonard (@sarahrlnrd) May 5, 2014

Note: Below is a picture of Cecily McMillan in her bra, showing the bruise on her breast. This is a picture she made public but it's possibly NSFW depending on your workplace.

Across the internet, yesterday, you might have read any number of progressive voices talking about Cecily McMillan.Cecily McMillan was part of Occupy NYC and may go to jail for 7 years for allegedly elbowing a police office in the eye. She's been found guilty. She's been remanded even though she poses no flight risk. She'll be sentenced in a few weeks.

I want to think about this story through the lens of the cult of compliance - the idea that our culture venerates compliance itself.

There are, of course, more important stories here - the imprisonment of a woman, the attack on progressive values, even room for a nuanced debate on the nature of policing in moments of civil disobedience. These things matter. You should follow the link below and read more, call whoever you can who might be in power here, and advocate. Still, I think it's indicative of a much bigger problem, not just the elements of a police state that do infuse our society, but something deeper, cultural, nearly religious. Compliance is one of our idols.

Molly Knefel in The Guardian writes:

When the police moved in to the park that night, in formation and with batons, to arrest a massive number of nonviolent protesters, the chaos was terrifying. Bovell claimed that McMillan elbowed him in the face as he attempted to arrest her, and McMillan and her defense team claim that Bovell grabbed her right breast from behind, causing her to instinctively react.

But the jury didn't hear anything about the police violence that took place in Zuccotti Park that night. They didn't hear about what happened there on November 15, 2011, when the park was first cleared. The violence experienced by Occupy protesters throughout its entirety was excluded from the courtroom. The narrative that the jury did hear was tightly controlled by what the judge allowed – and Judge Ronald Zweibel consistently ruled that any larger context of what was happening around McMillan at the time of the arrest (let alone Bovell's own history of violence) was irrelevant to the scope of the trial.

The real problem here is the judge. The judge has consistently ruled that no one gets to say anything that doesn't serve the police narrative. The cop may have been elbowed, but has consistently identified THE WRONG EYE when telling the jury where he was hurt.  The cop has a history of violence - not relevant. McMillan has a hand-shaped bruise on her breast [the picture below is one she tweeted out] - not relevant.

The judge gets to decide what story it is even possible to tell, and in this case has worked to limit the scope of the trial to did McMillan hit Bovell in the eye or did she not. Although a pacifist, she probably did elbow out (in panic at being grabbed by the breast), the jury decided, and convicted her.

In this context, not only do the police feel they have complete authority to act against non-compliant individuals as they see fit, but the justice system conforms to make sure that that no counter narrative is even offered to a jury. That, to me, is the gravest offense here. She's not being allowed to defend herself, she's not allowed to offer her own story, and in silence, she is convicted.

McMillan is being sacrificed to the idol of compliance.

Cult of Compliance - University of Virginia Edition

Not a case of beer

The blog Police State USA does a fantastic job of tracking and writing up incidents of police brutality, overreach, abuse, and other nefarious conduct. I continue to focus on the cult of compliance. This story is from the summer of 2013:

• Three female college students went to the grocery story and bought bottled water.
• Two plainclothes police on beer patrol (for the ABC - Alcoholic Beverage Control) thought the water might be beer, so came at the car. Demanding the women stop and open the car windows.
• The women panicked and tried to get away, alleging they didn't know the armed men were police. And in order to open the windows they would have to start the car, and one the driver started to start the car, the officers got aggressive, jumping on the hood, banging on the windows, and calling lots of backup very quickly.
• The women drove away, calling 9-1-1, only to learn that their assailants were actually police. 
• The police charged  the driver with felonies (since withdrawn), and the driver had to spend the night in jail.
• Public outcry has followed.

You can read the post at Police State or the original UVA newspaper article here. Jonathan Turley, another of my favorite bloggers, hosted a piece on it here.

I want to focus on the explanation of what happened that ABC posted to their Facebook page (my emphasis):

Agents were working in the area, concentrating on underage possession enforcement. An agent observed what appeared to be an underage person in possession of what appeared to be a case of beer, and approached her to investigate. The agent identified herself as a police officer and was displaying her badge. Other agents did not join the incident until the subject refused to cooperate. Rather than comply with the officers’ requests, the subject drove off, striking two officers. She was not arrested for possessing bottled water, but for running from police and striking two of them with a vehicle. 

The agents were acting upon reasonable suspicion and this whole unfortunate incident could have been avoided had the occupants complied with law enforcement requests. We take all citizen complaints seriously and the matter is currently under review by the ABC Bureau of Law Enforcement.

That's the line, folks. None of this would have happened if the occupants had just complied. Frankly, the women are lucky no one fired at them.

That's the cult of compliance.

Rape Culture and Disability - New Jersey Edition

According to a report from NBC New York (also covered in Jezebel, and thanks to my friend K. for the story tip), a woman with Multiple Sclerosis was gang raped in a warehouse in New Jersey. 

She fell asleep on the bus (she is on a narcotic for pain), woke up in Trenton, left the bus, got disoriented, and was gang raped. The details of the assault are upsetting. Her medical care was allegedly sub-standard. And as happens far too often, things got worse when she went to the police.

She told [the police] that she was a multiple sclerosis patient on a medical pain patch prescribed by her doctor in part for a spine injury she suffered from an MS-related seizure. Her longtime doctor confirmed to NBC 4 New York he'd prescribed a narcotics patch, Fentanyl, due to the injury.

Kris says she gave a detailed account of what she remembered about the rape, but says the detectives began a hostile form of questioning and that they treated it like "it was a big joke and a waste of time."

“When he asked his partner if there was one question they would like to ask, the one and only question he could come up with, out of everything in the book, was: ‘Did you voluntarily pull down the man’s pants before he raped you?’" said Kris.

“They tag-teamed," said Kris. "'Was I out there soliciting? Was I out there buying drugs? Why did I get off the bus at that spot?'"

Kris’s mom said the detectives kept pressing her about her daughter’s illness.

“'You sure about her MS?' That’s all they kept asking me," said Kris' mother. "'Are you sure she didn’t fall and this isn’t MS?' They wanted to turn everything around, make her the victim all over again, and it was crap. Plain and simple crap. They didn’t want to do their job.”
Records show Kris has no criminal history for drugs or prostitution. She had one past shoplifting case where charges were later dismissed.

Let's parse this. First, of course this is only the victim's side of the story. I find it credible because it falls into the same patterns of experience as so many other women. The police feel that they have to work hard to make sure that the victim isn't to blame for her assault, and then they are reasonably likely to eventually process the evidence and try and find the rapists, although rape kits often sit in evidence lockers, ignored, as serial rapists continue their crimes.

Rape culture is, among other things, police who start with the assumption of doubt in rape cases, despite at least 50% of all rapes going unreported, and false rape claims falling between 1%-6% of all reported cases.

But here's my real point - this case is only news because of the victim's disability. Because she has MS, the media has a neatly packaged explanation for why her story is credible and why she's likely to be sympathetic to their readers. It's the same kind of story as my piece for CNN on Jane, a woman with Down syndrome who was raped. I wrote (and commented on this quote here, pointing out people with disabilities DO have sexual agency):

And here is where disability comes back into play. Because of her Down syndrome, Jane is relatively immune to the kinds of victim-blaming endured by other women who are assaulted or abused. 

We know she wasn't asking for it. We can't blame her for staying in the house while Dumas got drunk. We know she didn't encourage him, then change her mind the next day. All of the myths about false reporting of rape don't apply to Jane because of her disability, and for that at least we can be thankful. Jane's experience points to the offensive way women's behaviors are interrogated when they seek justice.

But as the next trial unfolds, do not focus on Jane because she is a woman with Down syndrome. Focus on Jane because she is a woman who says that she was raped. Focus on Jane because she's joined the ranks of other women, women of all races, classes, sexual orientations, and levels of ability who have said that they were raped and then had their testimony disregarded by a judge on the basis of not acting enough like a victim.

The same goes for Kris. She needs justice. The forensic evidence needs to be processed and the rapists arrested. But deserves justice because she was raped, not because she was a woman with a disability who was raped.

The story here is about rape culture. Disability intensifies the story and provides a tool with which to cut aside the usual excuses, defenses, and denials that rape culture generates, because Kris' experience with the police gets played again and again in police stations across the country.

Cult of Compliance - Albuquerque Cops Shoot Mentally Ill Homeless Man

This is my 200th post on the blog. It's not a happy one.

As long-time readers know, my work on the Ethan Saylor case led me to coin the phrase the "cult of compliance." This phrase allows me to link diverse moments in which authority figures respond to non-compliance with egregious acts of violence and place them against the backdrop of normalized veneration of compliance in our culture.

Flash-bang grenade at Abq park

We only get the stories that make the news, often when a person with disability (which excuses the non-compliance in our eyes) gets hurt. These events are serious, often tragic, and deserve media attention, but the bigger picture of the non-news matters just as much, because recognizing the disease, over the symptom, is critical to effect change. Individual authority figures, whether police officers or principals, need to be held accountable for their actions, but we also need the broader context to understand why the stories keep occurring. Hence, the cult of compliance.


In Albuquerque, New Mexico, police shot and killed a mentally-ill homeless man named James Boyd. Here's the story:

A week ago, APD officers found a 38-year-old man camping in the foothills. A man in mental crisis, he first threatened officers. Then he agreed to surrender, gathered his things and began to walk towards officers as instructed.
That’s when an officer shouts “Do it!” and officers targeted him with a flash-bang grenade normally used in SWAT assaults. He drops his things, steps back from the blast and pulls out two small knives he previously put away at officers’ request.
Then he turns away and they open fire with live rounds and a police dog. He later died.

So the man complies, they throw a grenade, he panics and reaches for knives, but is retreating. Again, he is retreating (follow the link and you can watch the video. I choose not to re-post it here).

We have videos like this because of lapel cameras and car cameras. A fair criticism of the concept of the cult of compliance is that it's nothing new, that it's not linked to the militarization of police or any other cultural shift - it's the way human nature mixes with authority - only now we have video to prove it.  I think technology has played a role in raising awareness about this kind of abuse, and surely specific populations have long been subjected to mandatory compliance. African-Americans call it "the talk," a conversation in which they tell their children to obey police instantly and completely in order to keep them from being shot.

I think the cult of compliance is spreading, not retreating, not even in the face of greater access to police video and the near-universal presence of cell-phone cameras in most situations. And maybe as it becomes a white suburban problem, white suburban Americans will take notice and push to effect change that can help protect those minority families and people with disabilities (my specific topic) that are so endangered by the cult.

But not so far in Albuquerque. ProgressNow reports that the Albuquerque police have, since 2010, shot more people than the NYPD, despite the relative size differential between the two cities. The DOJ is investigating.

Meanwhile, the local police chief has ruled on the killing. "Justified."